The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  Arnold Toynbee praised it in The Observer; Sir Cyril Hinshelwood in the New Scientist; Richard Boston in the New York Times; and Arthur Hummel, the dean of scholars studying the Qing dynasty, in the American Historical Review. Old Laurence Picken, the embittered ethnomusicologist who had ample cause to give the foulest of commentaries, wrote in the Manchester Guardian that Needham’s achievement was “prodigious…perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man.” And the Russians said that Needham’s work showed “a deep respect for the Chinese people, their creative genius, and their great contribution to Chinese civilisation.”

  It was a triumph, evidently a complete vindication. The entire printing of 5,000 copies of Volume I sold out, and Cambridge had to go back to press at regular intervals in the following years. The book remains a classic, an essential work, and it has never yet been out of print.

  In the short term, however, this critical success did surprisingly little for Needham’s standing in Cambridge, where, as in many academic communities, venom can take decades to dissipate. When he returned to Caius after his weeks of hiding away in France, he had few opportunities to escape the atmosphere of opprobrium. There was little comfort for him anywhere. He was frequently excoriated in the college. He could no longer seek solace in the biochemical laboratories. Christianity seems to have offered him less spiritual sanctuary than it might. Gwei-djen remained in Paris. Dorothy was deeply immersed in her own academic work. There was still scoffing in the press, perpetually reminding him of his much diminished status.

  All he had left for comfort was China. It is impossible to overstate the role that China played in securing Needham’s foundations during this trying and uncertain period of his life. China—its people, their language, his own memories—provided Needham with the spiritual sheet anchor he needed, and with the necessary intellectual comfort.

  Not that these were the most propitious years for him to be nailing his flag to the polities of Peking. Peking—Beijing today47—was in decidedly bad odor in the West during the 1950s, particularly in America. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and since China’s involvement in the Korean War, the U.S. government’s official position was a firm and unyielding hostility toward Communist China, combined with a firm and unyielding support for the Nationalist regime on the island of Taiwan. A treaty to that effect was signed in 1954, giving American presidents the formal authority to use arms to defend Formosa, as Taiwan was then widely known, in the event of an attack from the mainland. Following the principle that the enemy of my friend is my enemy, Communist China was seen, at least by America, as a foe.

  So Communist China was consistently ostracized by Washington throughout the 1950s and 1960s. There was no official American diplomatic recognition; Americans were by and large forbidden to go to China; there was a total trade embargo; there could be no financial dealings; and America did its best to keep the Communist Chinese from occupying China’s seat at the United Nations.48 “The United States holds the view that Communism’s rule in China is not permanent and that one day it will pass,” stated the official American doctrine of the day. “By withholding diplomatic recognition from [Beijing] it seeks to hasten that passing.”

  Yet Needham—who had openly wept with joy when Mao announced the formation of the People’s Republic—remained an unabashed supporter of the Beijing government. He stated as often and as publicly as he could that the communist system was the best possible social and political framework to govern a country as immense as China. He consistently denounced American policy at every opportunity—and by extension he also denounced what he considered anti-Chinese British policies, though they were fewer and less stridently expressed.49 And he fully accepted that by doing this he kept himself stubbornly out of step with much of the rest of the world.

  In 1955 he underlined his support for Mao and Mao’s regime in a small but practical way, by helping to found and becoming the first president of a briefly powerful and always controversial group, the Britain-China Friendship Association. He did this with Derek and Hongying Bryan, the couple whose marriage Needham had helped to inaugurate in China ten years before. All three of them were prominent in this unashamedly left-wing ginger group—and its eventual 2,000 members spent a furiously active decade engaged in what they saw as an essential bridge-building exercise: criticizing Britain’s lukewarm policy toward the People’s Republic, lobbying for an increase in trade between Britain and China, and arguing the case for China’s membership in the UN.

  When challenged on his belief that China was now a free nation—a view that was patently absurd to anyone who knew anything of Mao Zedong’s policies—Needham would retort that “the first freedom is to eat—and now the Chinese people are being fed.” It might have been the best he could do, but it was reckoned generally—and certainly by the members of Caius—an exceedingly lame response. Few could understand Needham’s firm adherence to the Maoist line—even when he attempted to explain that if Mao’s policies were seen in the context of the sweep of Chinese history, they would win wide outside sympathy. There was no doubt that his stubbornly held and trenchantly expressed views—his trenchancy always tempered, however, by his gently courteous manner—contributed significantly to his unpopularity during the 1950s.

  During this decade and the 1960s he intensified his support for almost every cause that was dear to the left. He joined, or spoke to, the Progressive League, the New Left Review Club, the Tawney Society, and the British Peace Society; he contributed to the Scientists Protest Fund; he cofounded Science for Peace. He marched to air bases and bomb plants with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote letters to the Times attacking, variously, America’s development of advanced nuclear weapons, the suggestion that Latin be dropped as an entrance requirement for Cambridge, and the proposal that representatives of the Viet Cong be forbidden to visit London.

  He held a public inquiry into an assault on a number of young Britons who went to a left-wing jamboree in East Berlin: American border guards had beaten them, Needham said, and yet the British government took no interest. He campaigned in vain to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from execution; he was also unsuccessful in demanding that a visiting American academic, a communist named J. H. Cort, be allowed to stay in Britain.50 He campaigned vigorously in favor of reforming laws against homosexual acts, protested the United States’ seizure of the scientist Linus Pauling’s passport, and took part in demonstrations against the military rulers in Greece.

  And he traveled, frantically. He spoke to or attended conferences in Warsaw, Jerusalem, Budapest, Beirut, Rome, Milan, Brussels, Prague, Munich, Florence, Salzburg, Madrid, and the town of Stralsund in East Germany. He was also invited to conferences in New Hampshire, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, but the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in London persistently declined to issue him the necessary visa—without saying why—and so he was obliged to withdraw. And though he was also invited to India to travel around the country and give a series of talks—his left-wing writings had made him enormously popular with Indian intellectuals—there was a sudden outbreak of border fighting with the Chinese, and Needham, who tended to favor the Chinese position in almost every dispute, decided it would be imprudent to go, and accepted a last-minute invitation to lecture in Romania instead.

  For years, then, the now late-middle-aged Joseph Needham was all over the map—wandering, campaigning, marching, working. And though his travels did not cease, his urgent need to get away did suddenly subside, and at a specific moment, in the late autumn of 1957. That was when a series of coinciding events occurred to change Needham’s life again, improving it and setting him on the path he was to follow for the rest of his days.

  Lu Gwei-djen returned from Paris that autumn, and this very much helped his mood. She settled back into her modest terrace house just 100 yards down the street from the Needhams. The three saw each other almost every day, an arrangement that appeared
to suit everyone.

  The second volume of his book appeared in 1956, and the third was grinding its way toward design and the start of production two years after that. The reviews of even the two first “throat-clearing” volumes had now, nearly universally, become quite lyrical: “a supreme achievement of European scholarship,” wrote the reviewer for a journal in Calcutta; “a book which is bound to modify all subsequent histories of Chinese thought, and indeed the histories of thought the world around,” said the critic at the Far Eastern Survey in New York; “a masterpiece of modern scientific study” was the description given by a journal in Beijing; and the Times Literary Supplement noted, “The important fact about this work…is that it is very exciting.” Needham’s temper improved with every newspaper he read.

  Then came the most important and most surprising change: the slow unbending of attitudes within Needham’s ancient college, Gonville and Caius, suddenly started to accelerate. In the combination room a group of activists was slowly forming; eventually its members would stage a rebellion at the high table that would precipitate the most profoundly beneficial alteration in Joseph Needham’s standing.

  College historians will insist that this revolution started as a direct result of the war. The gerontocracy of dons that had so vehemently doubted Needham in his early years was now being thinned out by natural attrition, and a new group, made up of men who were younger, more widely traveled, and more worldly, was slowly infiltrating the cloistered halls. In October 1957 one of them, the Hungarian-born Peter Bauer—later to become Lord Bauer, one of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite economists—staged what has since become known (supposedly because of the English translation of his name) as the “peasants’ revolt.” He was joined in the endeavor by the biologist Michael Swann, who would also later become a peer, and chairman of the BBC. These two men were exasperated by their lack of power in making college decisions and, to mutterings that suggested a scandal of the first water, they stood up and said so at that year’s famous and long remembered Michaelmas term general meeting.

  And despite the mutterings and the opposition from the older members of Caius the rebels won a healthy measure of support—Needham’s included. A vote was taken. For the first time in decades a modest change in the college rules was brought about, sufficient to ensure that the College Council, for which elections had never before been contested, would now be open to the candidacy of all fellows, and not limited merely, as had been the case for centuries, to the chosen favorites of the old guard. The placemen who had hitherto held power, most of them administrators rather than university teachers and researchers, were immediately weeded from office. Democracy, never in the fullest flower in either the Oxford or the Cambridge colleges of the times, took a tentative and eventually a firm hold: and the ruling oligarchs’ grip on college matters was slowly, but very steadily, released.

  This was to have enormous consequences for Needham. In 1959, thanks to the adroit maneuvering of his new allies, he was elected to no less than the presidency of the fellows—an unprecedented elevation for someone who just a decade before had been perhaps the most ill-favored figure in the senior combination room.

  The election came at a particularly propitious time. The third volume of Science and Civilisation in China had now just been published, and although critical reaction to the first two books had been good, with the appearance of the first “real” book, which dealt with mathematics and astronomy, there could no longer be any doubt: Needham’s much-vaunted project was going to be a vastly important monument of scholarship, an undertaking which, when completed, would rival James Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary and Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography51 as among the great intellectual accomplishments of all time.

  The changed reaction to Needham in the college also reflected a new attitude toward him outside it. All of a sudden he seemed to have been transmuted from a revolutionary villain into a figure who was being met with growing respect for what was clearly shaping up to be a formidable achievement. He was creating something for which he, his college, his university, his country, and a steadily enlightened West could be illimitably proud. And the new respect he was winning thereby helped to make his new job at the college a great deal easier—not, it has to be said, that this was among the most challenging of positions.

  The presidency of Caius College, at least in the 1950s, required only largely ceremonial duties—in the absence of the master, Needham would preside over dinner in Hall and over dessert in the combination room, and that was about it. But during his years as president, new duties would be added to his portfolio, to the point where by the middle of the turbulent next decade he held the post of college vice-master—giving him a set of responsibilities that proved ideal training for his next advance, which Needham, a dark horse, won by a majority vote of forty-five of the seventy-five fellows who were present at a formal meeting in early December 1965. This was when he became no less—and even at this remove the simple fact of his election beggars belief—than the master of the college.

  In academic terms Needham had made, in a little over forty years, an ascent from back-courtyard rags to high-table riches. He had achieved a stunning climb to power that rendered him now not merely a force to be reckoned with in the academic and literary worlds, but a figure of stature and power in one of the greatest universities in the world—and so a force in the realm as well. All of a sudden Joseph Needham was a man who, at work in the corridors of power of British life, very much mattered.

  He remained master for ten years, directing the ancient college through a time of almost unprecedented disturbance in the student world. Almost from the moment he undertook his duties, and had moved himself and thousands of his books into the master’s elegant lodging house beside the chapel and the Hall, the outside planet’s politics went badly awry, and the zeitgeist became relentlessly mutinous.

  The causes of the upset were many. With the disaster of the Tet offensive in 1968, the Vietnam War had entered a peculiarly violent phase, and Lyndon Johnson had announced his withdrawal from politics. In China the Cultural Revolution was at its height. The “Prague spring” had set Czech students in full opposition to their communist masters. Riots at universities had spread from Nanterre to engulf all of France, and the army had to be called out to suppress them. Students had been shot dead in Mexico. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Columbia University in New York had been shut by protests. There were riots outside the London School of Economics.

  And in the spring of that year the students in Cambridge also rebelled in solidarity. For a brief while this most genteel and affable of cities became the scene of sit-ins and marches, bottle throwings and arrests, littering and shouting and scuffles. This was no Kent State; but the cascade of events was serious enough to prompt an official inquiry, and to some degree it tested Needham’s mastership.

  It did so only to some degree because, we should remember, the master was very much a committed Socialist—even a communist, though still never a formal party member—and so was in general ideological agreement with the political aims of the students around the world, including those who were camped outside the back door at Caius. One student recalled that during a peaceful sit-down a window in the master’s lodgings was briefly opened a crack, and a weathered hand emerged holding a folded piece of paper. The student took it and the hand withdrew.

  “I wish you to know,” said a note written in ink in an impeccable hand, “that I support entirely all the reforms for which you are demonstrating today.” It was signed: Joseph Needham. His had been the window, his the hand.

  His leftist views were in no way dimmed by his prestigious position—though in many ways he was a great traditionalist, and he restored all manner of ceremonials and feasts to the Caius calendar. He wrote an elegant essay for the college chaplains on the numerous figures who, through the seven centuries of its existence, had given money or help to keep the institution going: he directed that the anniver
sary of each chaplain’s death (when it was known; he guessed the date when it was not) be memorialized in the chapel and celebrated by an oration followed by a black-tie dinner in Hall. Needham liked to eat, to dress up, to drink, to give cocktail parties, and to smoke cigars;52 a Cambridge college is the perfect place to indulge such habits, and the death of an ancient benefactor the perfect excuse for doing so: even the most restrained of fellows thought it would be churlish to complain.

  He was not able, however, to persuade the college governing body to admit women, either as fellows or as undergraduate students, during the ten years he held office.

  His traditionalism occasionally spilled over into areas where one might have supposed he would be a flaming liberal. For example, he forbade the installation of a condom-dispensing machine in one of the Caius bathrooms. Considering his own fondness for erotic amusement, this might seem to verge on hypocrisy; he justified it by explaining that while he favored the free association of the young, he thought that having condom dispensers installed in college would encourage “instant sex,” and of that he was not in favor. Far better that students who wanted sex take time to walk to the drugstore in town to buy their supplies, and think about the implications while they did so. This was a curious lapse in his understanding of human behavior—perhaps a willful one.

  He was by no means a killjoy, however. He was an exuberant man, given to partying, to spontaneous public singing—he would have adored karaoke, a friend remarked—and he danced wildly, if not well. The cultural anthropologist Francesca Bray, who would later write, more or less entirely, the volume on agriculture, has already been quoted: “You’d better watch your toes if/You dance with Joseph.”

  Since 1963 he had also been giving regular sermons from the pulpit of his favorite old church, in Thaxted. The memorably turbulent priest Conrad Noel had long gone, though Noel’s son-in-law Jack Putterill remained vicar until his death in 1973, and the radical, tolerant approach to Christianity which had so attracted Needham after his undergraduate years was still very much in evidence. He spoke on some forty occasions—ringing declarations, all well attended, on such topics as “Political Prisoners and Torture,” “Christianity and Marxism,” “Jealousy,” and “Robots and Unemployment.” He became embroiled in a brief controversy in 1976 when the Reverend Peter Elers, who was then the vicar, declared himself gay, and had to endure a torrent of criticism. Needham came swiftly to his side: